Getting Intimate With Elle Macpherson: It’s OK… It’s For Work

“What the hell are you doing?” asked my editor when he spotted me, clearly on MySpace and watching an embedded movie of a girl writhing around on her bed wearing next to nothing. “Oh, this?,” I stuttered. “Erm, it’s a new campaign for Elle Macpherson’s Intimates range of lingerie,” I responded. “Honest.”

“What the hell are you doing?” asked my editor when he spotted me, clearly on MySpace and watching an embedded movie of a girl writhing around on her bed wearing next to nothing. “Oh, this?,” I stuttered. “Erm, it’s a new campaign for Elle Macpherson’s Intimates range of lingerie,” I responded. “Honest.”

Yes, my “excuse” was in fact bone fide: The new campaign for Elle Macpherson’s Intimates line (art directed by Gary Freedman of Glue Society and shot by photographer Max Doyle) revolves around seven hot young things scantily clad in underwear from the Intimates range. Each has her own MySpace page on which a short film is posted showing the girl doing something unusual in the intimacy of their own home in their underwear. For example, one plays the, err, Tuba, one blows up her pillow (with an explosive charge), one makes a poodle out of a balloon, one tells jokes and – a personal favourite – one uses her hands to create a sillhouette of a drummer which she then makes play along to a drum solo.

Most MySpace users will have received a friendship request from a sexy-young-thing type page where an 18 year-old girl’s homepage shows an image of her wearing practically nothing, a description that says she’s a young model looking for a big break and that she’s got much more “interesting” images and a live webcam on another website – in case you’d care to take a look. This campaign attempts to poke fun at such pages without being tawdry. Rather the genuine “hotness” of the girls, the quality of films combined with the ridiculousness of what each girl is actually doing in her video (making cups and saucers levitate, for example) makes this campaign genuinely fun.

We notice the girls don’t have any “friends” at the moment apart from themselves and while it’s great that Glue Society haven’t felt it necessary to add thousands of friends to each page, we at CR can’t help but wonder how relevant sexy lingerie is to the MySpace population… Not very, we suspect, but as bringing our readers the latest in commercial communication is our raison d’etre, we thought it best to check out the campaign thoroughly. Actually, I don’t think we’ve watched all of the films yet – duty calls…

The campaign isn’t restricted to MySpace, the films are also on YouTube and press and poster ads will use stills of the films which lend them a particulary voyeuristic, webcam look – here are a couple of examples:

David Carson (once referred to by CR as “the most famous graphic designer in the world” which, admittedly, is a rather small field) has opened a studio in Zurich (shown above). The move marks a return to a country that played an important role in Carson’s development as a designer. Back in 1983, while at the University of Ohio, Carson attended a three week graphic design workshop at Rapperswill, just down the lake from Zurich “the first graphic design course, the first graphic design anything I had attended,” he says.